New Delhi, Sep 24 (ANI): Senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Yashwant Sinha on Saturday said Union Home Minister and former finance minister P Chidambaram should be put in the same jail cell as former telecom minister A.Raja for his role in the 2G telecom licensing scam, which in his view was one of the biggest cases of corruption in post-Independent India.
Talking to reporters here, Sinha said Chidambram's role in the scam was so overwhelming, that it was laughable that he was being defended by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in court.
Sinha, a former finance minister of the country, said Chidambaram's rightful place is in A.Raja's jail cell in Tihar.
He also questioned the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh's, silence on 2G controversy, and added that this unexplained silence was being seen as an acceptance of steps taken.
He said that the Prime Minister has been soft on Chidambaram who had advised him to accept A.Raja's proposals.
He said that Dr. Singh was informed by A.Raja about advancing the cut-off dates of 2G spectrum allocation and added that the recent Finance Ministry note to the PMO indicated that Chidambaram had changed his stand on 2G spectrum allocation.
Chidambaram defended the Department of Telecom's stand on 2G spectrum license allocation, rather than finance ministry's, said Sinha.
Chidambaram came under fire after a 14-page note, prepared by a senior bureaucrat in the Finance Ministry and seen by Pranab Mukherjee, suggested that Chidambaram could have acted more stridently in 2008 on the spectrum pricing issue, when he was the country's Finance Minister.
The note, which relied heavily on technicalities; says Chidambaram could have "stuck to the stand" of an auction of the highly valuable spectrum.
The note added: "It may be mentioned that while the UAS licenses were signed between February 27 and March 7, 2008, spectrum allocations were done starting only in April, 2008, almost four months after the LoIs were issued. However, these were not charged (beyond the normal spectrum usage charges) since there was consensus, at the levels of the Ministers concerned, that spectrum beyond the "start up" levels only should be charged."
The note has come into the public domain under the Right to Information (RTI) Act petition filed by Vivek Garg, a prominent activist.
The telecom scam, one of India's biggest graft cases ever, may have cost 39.57 billion dollars in revenue to the public exchequer as per the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG).
In its report, the CAG had disclosed that several guidelines and rules were flouted during the allocation of spectrum licences, which led to many ineligible firms winning licences.
A. Raja was sacked in November last year after being charged with giving away telecom licences in 2008 for a pittance at meagre prices of 2001 in the CAG report. He was later arrested on charges of misuse of ministerial office and criminal misconduct. (ANI)
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